Approaches to Scale-up and Assessing Cost-effectiveness of Programmes to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls

With its focus on low-income and middle-income countries, this review paper summarises evidence on the cost and value for money (VFM) aspects of interventions to prevent VAWG, as well as on approaches for scaling up such interventions. The specific objectives of the evidence review are:

To start to identify current VAWG prevention interventions that have been replicated in more than one setting;

To synthesise current evidence on the costs of VAWG prevention (focusing on good quality costing studies, rather than financial cost assessments alone);

Drawing upon the broader literature of intervention scale-up, to discuss how to conceptualise the replication and scale- up of violence prevention programming, and potential approaches to considering how to value the cost-effectiveness of VAWG prevention programmes, and the implications for future evaluation research;

To identify potential opportunities to conduct future economic evaluation of scaled-up VAWG prevention components, to enable lessons to be learnt about the variations in unit cost estimates, and to produce evidence of the impact of scale on programme costs.

Recommendations

Improve understanding of the pathways to intervention impact

Evaluate new models and existing models

Invest in understanding what different intervention models cost, and how these change with scale